When looking at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it is very important to look at the Civil War and it’s effect it had on Ms. Dickinson. The Civil War was the bloodiest era America had seen, and it was also the time that Emily Dickinson wrote an enormous amount of her work (Taggart 76). The severity of the war and the new weapon technology that allowed for faster and more brutal combat made Dickinson consider issues of liberty, life, and death in ways that she never had done so previously (Martin 34). Looking at two of her poems from this period, it is easy to see the issue of death being presented. In the poem titled “320” Dickinson ends her poem with the word death, and in the poem titled “407” death and ghost like images are presented throughout the poems entirety.
The impact of the Civil War on Emily Dickinson seems to be apparent with the subject matter of her poems at that time, but many theorist believe that other events happening at the time also might have been effecting Emily in ways that inspired her to write such a large amount of her work. From 1861 to 1865 Ms. Dickinson wrote approximately half of her 1,800 existing poems. In 1862 Ms. Dickinson wrote an average of one completely finished poem a day and many of these poems were considered to be her best work (Kirk 77). This enormous amount of poetry leaves many scholars wondering what besides the Civil War had such an effect on Ms. Dickinson to cause her to write such a large amount of her work and some of her most passionate work. The most advanced and what many people consider believable theory is that the sudden influx of passionate work came after she experienced a failed love affair. There are many possible candidates who could have been her possible lover, but unfortunately there is no hard evidence that supports any of the men being the one she had an affair with (Kirk 78). Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest American poets to have ever lived, and even though she has been and continues to be studied, there is still so much about her that remains a mystery including the reasons for so much of her work being written in the years of the Civil War.
Bibliography
Dickinson, Emily. “320” and “407.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume B, Ninth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2012.
Kirk, Connie Ann. Emily Dickinson: A Biography. Westport Ct: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004.
Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. United Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Taggard, Genevieve. The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Cooper Square Publishers Inc. 1967.
103A: American Literature from 1789 to 1900 
The influence of the Civil War on Dickinson’s poetry is interesting, because she does not allude to it specifically in any of the poems we read for class or any that I have read before (though that is obviously a very small amount compared to the 1,800 she wrote). I am interested to know where she would get her news about the war, famously being a recluse.
It would be easy to read the civil war into poems like 1263: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind” could refer to the horrors of war that men had seen and what that means in terms of human nature. Perhaps the poem is about not being able to handle seeing or hearing about so much cruelty and suffering in the war without going mad or deadening the brain to such horrors. However, the abstract philosophical tone of so much of Dickinson’s poetry allows for a broad range of interpretations. The poem certainly applies to the Civil War, but whether this was her inspiration or whether something else, perhaps more personal, inspired it is unclear.
The idealized, allegorical representation of Death in poem 479 certainly doesn’t seem to fit with the brutality and widespread violent death of the war. The news from the war would have been a compelling memento mori for the poet, and in this way could account for her obsessive writing about death, but poetic tradition and introspective human nature could as well.
The fact that Dickinson wrote a majority of her works during the years of the American Civil War reveals a subtle political undertone within her poems, especially within her poem “788”. Dickinson wrote the poem “788” in 1863, two years into the civil war. Although Dickinson does not explicitly mention the civil war or slavery in the poem “788,” her mention of the object man, human auctions, “White Creator” and the pricing of humans suggests that authors’ struggle to publish mirrors the inhumanity of slavery.
After rereading the poems “320” and “407”, the theory of the poems being a response to the Civil War seems unlikely. The only evidence given in “320” to connect with the theory is the fact that Emily Dickinson ended with the word “death”. This evidence doesn’t seem concrete enough, and I don’t see any connection to the Civil War throughout this poem. Even though I don’t agree with the theory, the suggestion shows how unclear Emily Dickinson’s poems are due to her lack of contextual clues.
After reading many of the poems I came to the same conclusion that the poems were not direct responses to the civil war but just her own beliefs. Having moved away from the south and to the north I believe that Emily Dickinson wrote about what she was going through at the time since, as was brought up, she was a recluse. Having some poems hint at the war is something that comes with the time and place she was in, but not direct responses to it.
It is rather interesting that Dickinson wrote most of her work during the American Civil War. Her possible love affair is also rather interesting as we see the tone of her work start to change. It is also intriguing to see the effect love may have on a individuals writing, and in Dickinson’s case it clearly effected how she wrote.
In terms of her poetry, I don’t think it is as heavily influenced by the Civil War as others might think, mostly because her being a recluse means that unless it directly affects her life and the lives of the people she cared about it does not have much to do with her. While there is no definitive evidence to support who her lover was, it is only possible for her lover to be someone she was fairly close to since she does not socialize with those outside of her circle of family and close friends.
I find it very interesting how Dickinson didn’t want her poems published while she was alive and didnt give her consent for her work to be published. I feel as if Dickinson’s work plays well into the theme of the American nightmare because she was living in the Civil War period where families were agianst families and friends were against friends. This shows the American Dream taht people had strived for becoming the American nightmare in whcih change was the only possible way for actual freedom.